How about this: Reverse the top intake fan orientation to make it extract air from the case - will solve the problem of the single 120mm exhaust fan being too weak and allows to remove the top dust filter. ;)

What a shame that they spoiled the ship for a ha'porth of tar... Although I too would have thought that exhausting out of the top fan might work better.. it would be interesting to know how that would affect that overall case performance.

Originally Posted by TileAnd again the hard drive cages are an epic fail.

I've spoken to several case manufacturers this morning about your claims--that use all of the various hard drive orientations--and none have said that this orientation is inferior in terms of cooling performance.

A HDD orientation like in the FT01 does have the advantage though that you can remove / add HDD's even with long graphicscards installed that would get in the way if the HDD's would be the other way.
Also aslong as they cut big enough holes in the hdd "box" cooling shoudnt be a issue.

150£ for a midi tower that doesnt even have a removable mobo tray? no thanks, as much as I love the external design, I'd rather pay 20£ more and get the best case ever (lian li a77) or save a big sum and just get a cm 690 instead.

Shame really since Silverstone do make great cases. Cooling is much worse than I expected however I really think as part of your testing that you should have reversed the top intake. Many other sites reversed the fan's whilst reviewing the TJ07/TJ09 and experienced vastly different results.

When are peoplegoing to stop harping on about the orientation of hard disks....STOP! Should a case manufacturer decide to invest $$$,$$$ on R&D and deem their design sufficient to pass Q&C then you should rest assured that all will be well. Lian-Li did it back with the V1000 series. How many Lian-Li cases do you see stuffed with HDD's??? I have a TJ09 with 5 HDD's and no failures. It really is not an issue so shut up about it!

Apart from my rant's, another nice review BT. This was going to be my new case but I guess I should wait a while, this is screaming at me for a Crysis/Far Cry 2 inspired mod......hmmmmm!

Do Coolermaster realize how much they would make with an updated Black Widow? Update should be front, rear and top 120mm mounts, 6 drive bay's instead of 4 to mount radiators if your so inclined and a top and bottom PSU mount....They would clean up with that design!

Originally Posted by TileThe design of the hard drive cages, especially ones placed transversally has to be revised: there should be at least 20 mm distance between the hard drives and the system of rails should be slimmed down. These changes really help in cooling the hard drives a lot better especially with a king sized front fan.

The orientation doesn't make a blind bit of difference, but I agree that the distance between drives certainly does.

Who REALLY needs 7 HDD bays in a normal desktop computer anyway? After all 3 HDDs can be installed so that there's an extra bay between each of them... HDD-bay designs are always compromises between number of drives and amount of wasted space. If you had a couple of nicelyt spaced drive bays in a case like this then people would come ranting about not having enough bays :)

Well... for those who can't afford 1TB or even 1.5TB drives, you end up with a bunch of hard drives.
I own a Lian Li PC-101B case which is filled with 7 harddrives. I had to buy an extra Lian Li drive cage because the six drive slots was not enough.

Most reviews even these on Bit-tech only test the cases with a minimum of required stuff for a computer. That is MAX 1 HDD, 1 graphics card, no extra PCI cards (RAID controllers etc), only 1 DVD burner (many have two or a Reader+Burner setup).

Time to do some stress testing of the case as well and try to see how much stuff you can really fit while still keep it tidy. I'm sure most of the midi cases will fail miserably. It does not look pretty inside my Lian Li case.

This case is ugly as a bucket full of ar*eholes, i cant think of anything that redeems this case's styling, its just channeling one of those old beige cases we all remember so well from the 90's the only difference is its made of metal now

Originally Posted by TileThis case fails to me because of the badly designed hard drive rack..

You hate this case only because the drive bays are wrong? Personally I never use hd cages, I use the Nexus DiskTwin to put the hds into the 5.25 bays. And ditch the hd cages for more room for wc pumps and stuff

Originally Posted by [USRF]ObiwanYou hate this case only because the drive bays are wrong?

To be honest, there is such a big selection of cases on the market that I think it's ok to be very picky about even small details, It's not like your comparing lets say a k8 and nehalem, but something where thousands of variations are avalaible.